The FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Roger Stone’s home is a troubling sign for the future of America, according to Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Stone was arrested and charged Friday for non-violent process crimes, including lying to Congress as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged Russian collusion. Hannity argued that Democrats have been let off the hook for the same charge while Stone faced a violent and abrupt arrest, which shows that the FBI and Justice Department are not applying the law equally to Democrats and Trump’s associates.
“Without equal application of our laws and equal justice under the law, there’s one thing left to say to our great nation: Goodbye,” Hannity wrote in an op-ed adapted from his afternoon radio show and published by Fox News on Wednesday.
“The feds finally got their man”
“It’s good to know the feds finally got their man” after years of Democrats lying to Congress and getting away with it, Hannity wrote, pointing to former CIA director John Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, and “the folks who lied to the FISA court and years of scandals like Fast and Furious, IRS targeting conservatives, and Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.” Stone was arrested for political reasons, Hannity said, not actually lying to Congress — otherwise, he would have been “at the back of a long line” of Democrats who got a pass.
“Roger Stone, who is being charged not with Russia collusion, but the process crime of lying to Congress, was targeted for the same reason U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis said they went after Paul Manafort and the same reason they tried to bankrupt Gen. Michael Flynn,” Hannity said. “They want to put the screws to Stone, who is 66, to make him sing or compose against Trump. That’s the only reason.”
The Fox host went on to argue that the FBI’s Friday raid showed a troubling abuse of power and was little more than a politically motivated attempt to nab a Trump associate on a fabricated charge. Like others close to Trump including Paul Manafort, Stone was charged with a process crime — not collusion.
“Stone got the same treatment as Manafort and Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen. All the other people who lied to Congress or to FISA judges got a pass,” Hannity said.
A number of other conservative pundits, including Tucker Carlson, also saw the Stone raid as belonging to a troubling pattern of prosecutorial recklessness by the Mueller team, in which investigators have intimidated and threatened Trump associates and charged them with lying to investigators or Congress before offering them plea bargains in exchange for testimonies against Trump.
“He’s not El Chapo”
Of course, that the Justice Department appeared to apply a double standard in arresting Stone is troubling enough, but Mueller’s team also used a disproportionate force to arrest Stone on non-violent process crimes — a dead-giveaway of the Mueller team’s political motives, Hannity said. Hannity went on to question the need to send some 27 armed men and 17 vehicles, including armored cars, to Stone’s house to book him on non-violent charges.
“Roger Stone committed no violent crime. He’s not a drug dealer or a drug kingpin. He’s not a Mafioso or a gangster. He’s not El Chapo,” Hannity said, though he admitted that Stone may have lied to Congress. “All the feds had to do was call his lawyer and say, ‘Be at police headquarters for processing at 9 a.m. or we’re putting a warrant out for your arrest,’ and he would have shown up.”
Stone himself has also slammed the “Gestapo tactics” of Mueller’s team and said that he would have turned himself in voluntarily had Mueller alerted his lawyers of the indictment. The SWAT team supposedly raided Stone because they were afraid he would flee or try to destroy evidence, but Hannity went on to note that Clinton “wiped her hard drive with BleachBit and smashed phones to pieces to avoid turning [her e-mails] over.”
She escaped charges because, like other Democrats, “help[ing] the Deep State with its witch hunt for president Trump,” is a get out of jail free card, Hannity said. And to him, this all points to a troubling double standard that threatens the rule of law in America’s constitutional republic.
“There’s a danger here,” Hannity asserted. “We are a democratic republic. The Constitution that we cherish so much is the foundation of all law and order in this country. If you don’t apply the laws equally, only going after one group of people because of their political views, and you protect people with other political views, you’ve lost our Constitution. We’ve lost our country.”
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